Profile

I am based in the UK (Oxford), but work internationally including at UN negotiations and expert committees as well as with small scale farmers, local communities and civil society in the global South (especially Africa and Asia).

I’ve worked for four years now in the international technical expert group on risk assessment and risk management under the UN Biosafety Protocol. We just finished our guidelines for risk assessment, including for GM trees, GM mosquitoes and for monitoring of long term effects.

Underlying these guidelines is the precautionary principle which stipulates that if there is a risk of unacceptable or irreversible harm to the environment or human health, the lack of full scientific knowledge or consensus should not be taken as an excuse to delay actions in order to prevent such harm. To the contrary, it obligates the decision maker to practice precaution in the context of such uncertainty. This is also enshrined in EU law.

The Precautionary Principle is more essential than ever in a world that moves swiftly and where people feel as if they have control of technologies and knowledge. Precaution allows pause for thought; looking at recent history, we see so many places where the application of precaution would have been helpful – including asbestos, thalidomide, PCBs, mad cow disease. We should apply the precautionary principle rigorously before committing ourselves to new technologies that introduce new risks to the biosphere, including human health.

The ‘hopes’ & ‘fears for GM’ question could be considered leading questions.  As the questions are put, they lead the reader to link scientifically based concerns about GM with the negative emotion, ‘fear’, and link the pro-GM stance with the feelgood word ‘hope’. I don’t pin my ‘hopes’ or ‘fears’ on any one technology but try to stick to evidence. This requires – particularly for scientists – that I set aside my emotional responses of hope and fear in order to be able to challenge assumptions and preferences, especially my own, and accept whatever the evidence tells me, always recognising that every hypothesis only holds good until it is successfully challenged by new insights and new evidence.

It is important to first investigate the problem we are trying to solve and whether there are other, perhaps more appropriate, safer and cheaper means to do so.

Modern biotechnology is so much more than just GM crops and food. For sure, genetic engineering – or genetic modification – is a very good research tool that we have long applied in contained settings to gain further knowledge about how genes, metabolic pathways, organisms and external factors work and interact.  The problems arise when we try to turn it from a research tool to an application that is released into the environment. And also when we think of genes as the main determinants, when they are only one factor in a dynamic relationship between the genes, the organism itself, and its environment over time.

Modern biotechnology and genetic modification are often mentioned as if they were the same, whereas they are quite different. The use of genome sequencing combined with marker assisted breeding have both utilised tools of modern biotechnology but neither of these methods are GM because they do not involve direct intervention to force changes of the genome.  These non-GM methods have already led to the production of stress tolerant crops such as flood tolerant rice, drought tolerant maize and virus resistant cassava, or nutritionally altered crops, such as vitamin A-rich millet and maize.

So, having questioned the question, now here are some of my hopes & fears.

My Hopes

– That we find the courage to take up the agro-ecological system approach, making use of biodiversity and ecosystem functions, of sustainable farming practices and appropriate technologies. In the right combination this offers a healthy and plentiful food supply without a heavy ecological footprint.

– That we will really try to address our current problems honestly and openly, recognising that technologies are incredibly valuable for analysis and for improving our understanding but do not necessarily provide solutions to our problems.

– That we can provide a healthy, plentiful food supply under the control of farmers and communities.